Home Is Where The Heart Is
by OwlPostAgain7
Summary: The life of Lily Elizabeth Evans, told in 5 addresses.


Thank you to chinaglaze for doing such a great job betaing!

* * *

 **I.**

 _26 Pewley Hill, Guildford_

The house was small, square, and brick, and surrounded by other houses that were small, square, and brick. And yet it was not lacking in character. Vivid pinks and purples and yellows were arranged in perfectly straight rows in the front garden, and the big kitchen window had ivy growing up the sides.

Lily had a photograph, taken back when it was fashionable to take a picture in front of one's car. In the photo, her father was peering down at the camera, and his eyes, so much like his younger daughter's, were crinkled in laughter. His arms were wrapped around Lily's mother, and she looked younger and prettier than Lily could remember seeing her in years. Her mother was staring at the camera with a toothy smile that suggested quite plainly that all was well in Mary Anne Evans's little corner of the world.

The photo had hung against the slightly shabby wallpaper in the front hall, surrounded by softly lit photos of Lily and Petunia's baby photos and old school portraits.

Petunia was beside their mother, clad in a flouncy dress that must have been fashionable once. She could not have been more than four. Lily was gripping her sister's hand and beaming at the camera, tufts of copper-coloured hair escaping from short little plaits.

They were a perfect little family, of average size and average life. Lily's memory of the house had been dimmed by the years that followed, but she remembered swinging her legs at the kitchen table as she watched her mum make the coffee and the eggs. Her father drank buckets of coffee, and was forever leaving empty cups in odd places like the refrigerator or the bathroom counter. Mrs. Evans was convinced that he did it just to annoy her.

Their mother would dole out the breakfast and their father read them a little article from the newspaper. He liked to ask Lily and Petunia what they thought of the article, and they would giggle and give silly answers. Their mum would smile and he would kiss them all goodbye.

There were long afternoons spent in the park and, if Lily and Petunia were particularly good, special days in London. Her father liked the big shows and her mother liked the little shops. Her father had been of the opinion that one was never too young for culture. He said that he wanted to take Lily and Petunia to an Italian opera, but that they were too little and he was too poor.

The house had two bedrooms on the first floor, one big and one small. The smaller one was painted white with white frilly curtains over the big window. She liked to peer out from behind the curtains and watch the trickling stream of umbrellas, hats, and shiny cars.

The smaller of the two bedrooms had been fitted out with wire-frame white beds and a set of dressing tables. The dressing tables came with little white stools that had pink frills on the seat. Petunia and Lily would sit cross-legged on one of the beds and talk about nearly everything. Petunia told her which teachers to look out for when she reached Year 3, and Lily told her of the pleasures of Year 1. If Lily asked nicely, Petunia would read to her. Petunia didn't do the voices like their father did, but there was something calm and clear in the way she spoke.

Lily had a perfectly preserved memory of her mother bent over the cutting board making lunch. Her father darted into the kitchen, and he winked at Lily conspiratorially before creeping up behind her mother. He planted a kiss on the top of her head and Lily's mother yelped comically and nearly stabbed him with the sandwich knife. Lily laughed and Lily's mother grinned and pretended to be angry. She mimed jabbing her husband with the little knife, and Lily's father sank to the floor and held his stomach, moaning in pretend agony. Lily had shrieked happily when her father sprang to his feet and spun her around. Her bare foot had only barely missed a vase of flowers, and Lily could still hear the ring of the glass against the wood table before the vase settled back into place. It had been a near miss, but it was an old vase, and Lily's father had set her down quickly. There was a moment of silence, and then her mother turned back to the sink. Her father went upstairs and her mother made her a sandwich.

The happiness of the house might have been a rosy fiction of childhood, but Lily was never quite sure.

* * *

 **II.**

 _657 Leygate View, Cokeworth_

They had arrived in Cokeworth on an unusually cool Saturday in June. Lily's father had sent most of their things on ahead, but there was still an inordinate amount of things strapped to the roof of the car.

Her father had left his position in Surrey for a professorship in Manchester, and they had relocated accordingly. It was not as pretty as Surrey, but Lily rather liked it. Petunia did not, and she was rather sulky about the entire affair. Despite their eldest's feelings on the matter, Lily's parents were rather joyful about the entire process. Her father's new position meant more money and a house very much like those on either side of it.

Here, Lily had had her own bedroom, a neat little room with a blue duvet and tiny flowers on the curtains. Lily's new duvet was very soft and her window was very white. Petunia had the bedroom next door, and there was much movement between the two rooms on the first few nights of that long and eventful summer.

They had only been living in the house for two months when Lily met Severus Snape on one of their trips to the play park. The first encounter had ended badly, but the friendship had carried on quite briskly after that.

A few weeks after she had met Severus, Lily had gone upstairs to Petunia's room for something; she could not remember what. Petunia said she couldn't come in, and it took Lily a moment to understand what she meant.

By the time Petunia started Year 5, there was considerably less movement between the two bedrooms.

There was another thing that happened in the house with the too green lawn on Leygate View. Lily's father left and did not return for several months. This was not the first time such a thing had happened. When Petunia had been small and Lily smaller, he had left and not returned for two whole weeks. The memory had been clouded by childhood, and Lily did not remember anything but his return, which had been heralded by shrieks from Lily and Petunia and a tired smile from their mother.

But this time, in this house, she remembered everything. There had been a slam of bedroom doors and her father had marched out the door at seven o'clock at night. She remembered thinking how odd he looked in his work things so late in the evening. He had kissed the top of Lily's head and ruffled Petunia's hair while their mother watched from the top of the stairs. Lily's mother had taken them to a restaurant with a telly on the wall, and they had stayed until the owner came over and asked them to leave. When they finally returned home, all of the other houses had gone dark.

After her mother had tucked her in, Lily had climbed out of bed and crept downstairs. Petunia was already there, sitting on their mother's countertop so that she could see out the big kitchen window. Lily climbed up next to her sister, and they fell asleep watching the dark road outside. They kept up this vigil for nearly a week, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference. Her father did come back, sixty-seven days after he had left. She and Petunia watched telly while their parents spoke for a very long time in the back garden. By the time they came back inside, _Junior Criss Cross Quiz_ was over. Their mother made dinner and set the table with four plates. Lily plucked up her courage and asked her father if he was staying. He said he was. There didn't seem to be anything else to say on the subject.

Petunia turned twelve two weeks before the end of term, and she and the other year seven girls would go down to the cinema as often as their pocket money would allow. Lily spent most of her days in a scraggy patch of trees tucked between the banks of the river and the train station. In mid-July, she took up near permanent residence in the sitting room. She would curl up on the couch with an ancient copy of _The Complete Guide to Spellwork_ that Severus had nicked from his mum. Lily's father nearly tripped over her when he left for work and her mother asked why she didn't want to play outside or watch the telly.

When Professor McGonagall had arrived with the letter, her parents had spoken in the garden for a quarter of an hour before emerging with smiles on their faces. They had heartily congratulated her and Petunia had watched sulkily. After the excitement of magic wore off, Lily's parents keenly felt the impending loss of their daughter to a boarding school in remote Scotland.

When she had rolled her trunk back down the path that summer, pleased that the outcome of her first ever end-of-year exams, she found the house had deteriorated. The walls were still bright and the furniture still sparking, but it had lost its luster somehow.

Her mother had redecorated the kitchen in shades of white with orange and yellow accents. Petunia said that orange colors stimulated the appetite. Lily hated it.

On her third night back at home, her mother made roast beef and asparagus. Lily had cleared the table and made to leave, but her mother had called her back. The other three had watched silently as Lily took a seat at the plastic-y white table.

They were getting a divorce. Her father was going to take another job, and they would stay here with their mum. He told them that they could visit whenever they wanted, and Lily had nodded. They had waited until summer to tell Lily, because they thought, for their own unimaginable reasons, that it might make things easier.

After her parents had sent them upstairs, Lily had knocked on Petunia's door. Her elder sister stood in the doorway and stiffly informed their parents had informed her months ago. It was to be expected, she said. Then she told Lily she didn't want to be disturbed, and shut the door.

Her mother had stayed in the house, and the lines in her face had deepened as the long hot days of that summer wore on. Lily was rather ashamed of how much she wanted to be back at Hogwarts instead of out in far-flung Cokeworth with a mother who spent whole days in a dressing gown and a sister who directed dirty looks at Lily's owl and schoolbooks (and sometimes at Lily herself).

When Lily had rolled her trunk down the garden path, she found that she was not sorry to leave. Hogwarts burst with colour and activity and life, and it seemed the place for her.

In the years that followed, Lily would be slightly ashamed at the alacrity at which she accompanied Marlene's family to Barcelona and enjoyed Christmas morning in the Great Hall. But the house on Leygate View was too ordinary and its occupants too remote.

It was not until her fifth year that Lily realised that she was no longer a proper occupant of the house. Its numbers had dwindled to two while Lily was learning to make a forgetfulness potion and turn a tortoise into a teacup. Petunia and her mother seemed to cling to each other, their blonde heads bobbing along next to Lily's red one. She looked very much like her father, and for this she was sorry.

Her mother helped pack up the dressing table and the duvet a few weeks after Lily finished her seventh year. Neither of them talked much, and Lily was ashamed of how little she would miss the place.

Or maybe it was the people inside who had lost the happy haziness of Lily's childhood.

* * *

 **III.**

 _Gryffindor Tower, Hogwarts Castle, Scotland_

There was a reason they made all of the first years come via boat.

She suspected that every former Hogwarts student—regardless of house or blood status—could still remember sitting in a school boat with three other first years and staring up at the Hogwarts castle in all of its glory.

And it really was glorious.

The castle radiated warmth and light and—above all—magic. It bathed the grounds in soft light, so Lily could see the outline of the forest and the gamekeeper's cabin.

In her first month at Hogwarts, she would have to remind herself not to gape at things like the owl post in the morning and the portraits on the wall. Most of the others had been raised in wizarding homes, and while they were perfectly accustomed to owls and bursts of magic, Hogwarts had a way of occasionally rendering even the most jaded student speechless with awe. She was living in a _magical castle._

She remained in this state until the first weekend of October. She woke to the sound of rain and hail pounding against the windows of the dormitory, the kind of rain that made her soft white sheets and heavy comforter feel all the more comfortable. It was nearly eleven when Marlie forced her out from under her comforter with the promise of some of the sweets that Grace's mum sent her every weekend. The five of them gorged themselves on Kipling cakes until Marlie threw herself on Lily's bed and swore that she would never be able to move again. In the common room that night, a fifth year gave an impromptu performance of "Cauldron's Boiling Over (For You)," and she had cheered and shouted the chorus with the other Gryffindors. As she brushed her teeth and brushed her hair, she was struck for the first time with the realization that this—the magical castle and the songs about cauldrons and all of the rest—was her life. She had stared up at the hangings and smiled so hard that her cheeks hurt.

She was a witch, and Hogwarts was where she belonged. She had a home with her mother and Tuney, but Hogwarts was her world. She belonged at Hogwarts, surrounded by owls and Quidditch games. That was where she was blissfully happy and loved and liked. There were times when she felt tired or overworked, but never quite unhappy.

It was odd, returning to muggle life in the summers. It was as if she had thrown herself into the waiting arms of the wizarding world, and the wizarding world had wrapped its arms around her and held tightly for months.

The existence of muggles with their own news stories and ideas became almost a matter of theory. She didn't need to think about the world beyond Hogwarts and Diagon Alley.

Then a muggleborn girl threw herself from North Tower.

Talk of an Imperius curse trickled down the Great Hall tables. It seemed certain that the culprit had been one of the older students, the ones who snuck out to the Forbidden Forest and snickered when the world "mudblood" was uttered. The fears grew like weeds in the cracks in the thick stone floor, strangling friendships and breeding open distrust between houses.

After several months, it was decided that the girl had been under the Imperius curse for several months before the incident, but that no curse had forced her to jump. No, that she had done of her own free will. One of the older Slytherins received detentions for the rest of the term for referring to the girl as "the mad mudblood" in earshot of Professor McGonagall.

Lily and the other prefects took to patrolling the corridors, first alone, and then—after a particularly gruesome attack in Upper Flagley—in pairs.

The pretty trappings of magic—the portraits, the enchanted ceiling, the games played on broomsticks— made it easy to forget about dark magic and bloodlines and politics.

She had forgotten that Hogwarts was a castle in the truest sense of the word. Castles like Hogwarts hadn't been built for the princess stories and childish fairytales. They had been built for war. For over a thousand years, Hogwarts had been protecting students against all manner of things. Suspicious muggles, goblin attacks, and even the occasional wizard. But what good was a fortress when your attacker was already inside?

Hogwarts wasn't a school. It was a stronghold.

But for better or for worse, it was where she belonged.

* * *

 **IV.**

 _42 Great Windmill Street_

They had never really discussed it. James had written to an office in Diagon Alley, and Lily had flicked through a catalogue. When the last term was over, they had taken the Underground to Piccadilly Station and pushed their way through the crowds until they had reached the building, an ugly brick affair with white window frames.

That very day, Sirius and James had dragged in all of the new furniture. Lily had counted herself lucky that she had not been asked to help; there were enough boys that she, with her sharp elbows and knobby knees, would have been a nuisance. Instead, she made lemonade and invited them all over for dinner. It was like playing pretend, making a roast and kissing James on the cheek when he volunteered to carve it. She served bread and vegetables and James' friends congratulated him on picking someone who could feed him and tried to convince Lily to leave her lump of a husband. Lily had smiled coyly and they had gone on like that for a very long time. At some point, James had unearthed several bottles of Ogden's Old. Lily had insisted upon christening the crystal-cut tumblers that had come with the 32-piece glassware set that James' mother had given them as a wedding gift.

Peter, Remus, and Sirius gamely played along with the ceremony of it all, cheering the opening of the Ogden's Old and accepting the heavy-bottomed glasses with utmost grace.

In the end it didn't matter, because they were all so drunk that they would not have noticed if they had been drinking out of cauldrons. Lily lay draped over James' lap, listening vaguely to Remus's meandering soliloquy on something or another. James's stomach moved up and down as he laughed at stupid things. The feeling made her laugh too. In the early hours of a late June morning, Sirius, Remus, and Peter trooped off and James half-carried her off to the bedroom. She slept curled up against James, her cheek against the cold plastic of the pale blue mattress.

But Lily never quite loved the flat. It was pretty enough once she had dressed it up, but it was not really home. And anyway, they never made much of an effort with the place. The kitchen table was too big, and they were forever running into the corners. Aside from the few things Lily had ordered from that catalogue in between studying for N.E.W.T's, most of the furniture had belonged to James' parents. She and James promised each other that they would go shopping and pick some things of their own. But there were patrols, potions, and well-deserved nights out.

After a while, they grew so used to the presence of the oversize table and the stiff and slightly shabby couches that Lily forgot that they had intended to bin all of it.

They didn't have proper jobs. There were unbearably long shifts outside empty buildings, forays into seedy bars in her shortest skirt, lessons with the Order's best healer, and a half-dozen cauldrons on the kitchen counter.

Despite her best efforts, the table was always littered with the kinds of potions ingredients that made James wrinkle his nose. He would help her sometimes, and the thick fumes of frogspawn mixed with valerian root would rise around them, making him gag. When she started brewing potions for the Order in earnest, the smell seemed to take up permanent residence in the kitchen.

They began to take turns picking up takeaway instead of cooking. She and James would eat in the sitting room, because there were half a dozen cauldrons in permanent residence on the dining room table.

James would shuffle home from patrols at eight in the morning to find her cutting potions ingredients or studying from one of Morwenna Dearborn's old healer textbooks. They would curl up on the expensive couch and eat Indian food from foil containers.

A few weeks after she turned nineteen, she and James papered over the walls of the tiny spare room. They dragged James' old crib up the creaking stairs, and Eleanor Bones gave them a changing table.

Harry was showered with toys and affection by everyone from Sirius to – rather unexpectedly – Alastor Moody. They were tripping over baby things and storage boxes, and they promised themselves they would move when things settled down. Maybe in a year or two.

Then Dumbledore asked to speak with them privately.

They never went back to the apartment.

* * *

 **V.**

 _68 Crown Street, Godric's Hallow_

The house looked like something out of a worn half-timbered frame and white plaster gave it the look of a house that might have stood on that very spot since the days of Merlin. In fact, it was barely twenty years old, and the shabbiness was mostly manufactured. It had all of the latest muggle technology and fully operational plumbing, which was more than some of the rambling houses set well away from the street could say.

They spent a whole week at Hogwarts before they could sort out a safe house. The new house was tucked away at the end of a little street, and had three bedrooms and a little dining room. James had been swept away by the possibilities of the house in Godric's Hallow.

Neither of them wanted to say it out loud, but she could see the way he looked at the big dining room table and the big front room. There could be no question that starting a family wasn't the sensible thing to do, they had both agreed on this. And yet she couldn't help letting herself imagine the possibilities of a future in which Voldemort was defeated and every chair at the table was full.

She and James cleaned out the garden shed, and James nailed five broomstick hooks into the wall. She didn't mention it.

They painted Harry's nursery creamy yellow, and outfitted it with half the contents of the magical toyshop. Harry was fascinated by his toy broomstick, and James proclaimed their son would be the star on the Gryffindor Quidditch team. She rolled her eyes and said she had her fill of Hogwarts Quidditch games.

Sometimes, she would let herself imagine that the war wasn't brewing just outside her kitchen window. She pretended that it was only her, James, and Harry. A perfect little family, utterly alone in the universe. Like some sort of absurd anthropological exhibit.

She would hold Harry and try desperately to imagine Harry dragging his school trunk down the pristine oak stairs or sneaking into his room at two in the morning. But she knew somewhere in her heart that they won't survive the year. Someone was whispering, telling her to say her goodbyes, do those things that she had always meant to do.

Call it pessimism, call it mother's instinct. But she knew that they were never going to get out of that house.

\- Fin –


End file.
